Switzerland's nationhood: a normative approach *

. In this article, I explore the subject of Switzerland's nationhood in light of a theoretical approach based on normative principles. This approach has the advantage of avoiding the definitional conundrum arising from the plurality of purely descriptive (often historical) definitions of nationhood. Instead, in accordance with certain normative inferences concerning what the nation ought to be given the principles of democracy, law and inclusion, it portrays the nation as a political entity having the largest possible group of individuals instituting a space of public discussion within a state. In this normative definition, attention should be drawn to the concept of ‘space of public discussion’, which, to my mind, entails the existence of a common public language used by its citizens – something notably different from either the multilingualism of the elite or a common parliamentary language. Proceeding in this way, I will defend the idea that Switzerland is a multinational state on the basis that cantons may be considered small nations, although certain pressures on the boundaries of the cantonal public spaces tending to expand them to the whole of the linguistic region must also be taken into consideration.